Art Exhibit Fits Uptown To A T-shirt

August 29, 1990|By Charles Leroux.

Directly across the street from the art exhibit is a liquor store. There`s another liquor store down the block, next to the vacant lot.

Cocaine dealers know this multi-ethnic Uptown neighborhood well. And for those too poor to afford cocaine, there`s a substitute drug known on the streets as ``tally,`` a kind of paint solvent that kids pour on rags and sniff to physically devastate themselves.

Though there have been some heroic renovations of individual buildings, gangs still struggle to control the meaner streets around here, and white supremacists have tried to get a toe in the door.

This exhibit of 15 art T-shirts is at the Magnolia Drycleaners, 1230 W. Wilson Ave., a Vietnamese-run cleaning and tailoring establishment where, as the exhibit brochure notes: ``Tailor Hoanh Nguyen is on duty to serve all your sewing needs.``

Is this any place for an art exhibit?

Chris Drew will tell you that this is the best possible place for it. And, if you talk with him long enough, you`ll learn also that the 125-shirt, 56-artist exhibit-spread among this and four other non-gallery sites in the area-is the first shot at what could be a revolution in the world of art.

``In disadvantaged communities, especially in minority communities, the tradition has been for administrators to be paid to find artists who are asked to donate their work,`` said Drew, a longtime community arts activist.

``Instead of fostering a healthy arts community, the system gives us a sick arts community, with artists dying on the vine. This is the richest country on Earth with the poorest artists. I`m sick and tired of it.``

The ``Art of the T-Shirt`` exhibit is what he is doing about it. Drew has created a subversive-at-heart exhibit, an infiltration of art into a community that wouldn`t likely go out looking for it and a step-by-step plan to turn the art ``system`` from a trickle-down to a trickle-out way of thinking.

Drew sees the shirt show growing year by year to maybe 20 little places where art would sneak into daily life. The artists would make some money selling usable art objects, and a percentage of the profits-30 percent now-would be put into inner-city youth art projects.

Back in the early `80s, when Drew, 39, was in St. Paul, Minn., he realized that, ``with the Reagan administration, it was obvious that there was going to be little money for community art.``

He came to Chicago in 1984, did a mural at an Uptown church, and struggled-for himself and others-to get around the lack of funding for artists.

In 1987, he decided to create the Uptown Multi-Cultural Arts Center, which serves as a market for community art. The arts center, housed in the American Indian Center, 1630 W. Wilson Ave., is dedicated to funding youth workshops by marketing community art. The vehicle for accomplishing what Drew calls an ``artist-friendly community arts movement`` is the arts center`s Gallery of the Alley and its T-shirt exhibit, ``a town-hall meeting of artists` work on T-shirts.``

The T-shirts will be on display through mid-September.

The exhibit, though on a much smaller scale, was first shown at a doughnut shop. As more shirts came in, the exhibit spread to four other sites- Bezazian Library, 1226 W. Ainsley Ave.; Edgewater Library, 1210 W. Elmdale Ave.; North Lakeview Library, 3754 N. Southport Ave.; and the North Side Federal Credit Union, 5019 N. Sheridan Rd.

The spaces are all what Drew calls, ``non-funded,`` that is to say, free. So when a new partner in the doughnut shop wanted to hang advertising in the space the shirts occupied, the exhibit moved on.

The artists range from some who have studios to 15 students from Roberto Clemente High School. Among the group is an Ethiopian woman, Sewasew Meaza, who did a shirt depicting the alphabet her ancestors used in 200 B.C., and a man who signs himself ``Artistic`` and whose early art training took place on garage doors with spray paints.

``These are non-established artists,`` Drew said. ``Artists who already have gallery representation don`t need us. We are the gallery of first resort.``

The shirts sell for about $20 to $60, not much for original art but more than most of the people who see them can afford. Drew wants to do prints of some of the artwork so that the shirts could be reproduced in quantity and inexpensively.

The exhibit, most of which is at the North Lakeview library location, includes beautiful shirts; angry shirts; shirts that speak of black and Puerto Rican and Native American pride; and shirts that startle.

One shirt shows a take-off of an American Express card. The ``American Excess`` card T-shirt speaks to high interest rates and the state of American finance in general. Drew, ever subversive, hung it in the credit union.